How to read a days-of-cover picture without drowning in columns
A days-of-cover bar is a weather chart for a SKU. Thick ink means the bay will go quiet before the next truck; a pale line means you are paying rent on cardboard.
A days-of-cover picture is not a table with eighteen columns. It is a row of bars, one per important SKU or family, showing how many selling days the current count would last if last month’s rate held. We draw it that way because a warehouse supervisor can read a bar while standing up. A spreadsheet of the same numbers tends to stay in the office.
What the thickness means
A short, dark bar means the bay will empty before the next known arrival. That is a stock-out risk, not a moral judgement. A long, pale bar means the cardboard is paying rent. In a Tbilisi dry-goods depot we often see sugar as a short dark bar in December and a pale one in March, because the New Year rate is treated as if it were the year.
What it is not
It is not a forecast of a new product. If you never sold a line, we will not invent a bar for it. It is not a substitute for walking the aisle: a bar built on a five-week-old count is a picture of five weeks ago. We write the count date in the margin so nobody pretends otherwise.
How to argue with it in a sitting
Bring the vendor’s real lead time, not the brochure. If the Poti ferry slipped last four times, the short bar needs more days, not a speech about “being lean.” Bring the Saturday rate if weekdays are quiet. A grocer in Saburtalo once almost cut a biscuit line because the weekday till looked dead; Saturday told a different story, and the bar was redrawn.
Pin the sheet beside the pick list for a fortnight. If the picker laughs at a bar, listen. The floor is allowed to correct the ink.